Photon correlation microscopy of quantum matter

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Hauptverfasser: Vandoolaeghe, Elie, Lasheras, Iñigo, Vaswani, Chirag, Saha, Sampriti, Ray, Purbasha, Taniguchi, Takashi, Watanabe, Kenji, Sahoo, Prasana, Defenu, Nicolò, Chervy, Thibault, Murthy, Puneet A.
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Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Vandoolaeghe, Elie
Lasheras, Iñigo
Vaswani, Chirag
Saha, Sampriti
Ray, Purbasha
Taniguchi, Takashi
Watanabe, Kenji
Sahoo, Prasana
Defenu, Nicolò
Chervy, Thibault
Murthy, Puneet A.
author_facet Vandoolaeghe, Elie
Lasheras, Iñigo
Vaswani, Chirag
Saha, Sampriti
Ray, Purbasha
Taniguchi, Takashi
Watanabe, Kenji
Sahoo, Prasana
Defenu, Nicolò
Chervy, Thibault
Murthy, Puneet A.
contents Light and matter share fundamental statistical properties, yet the experimental probes of quantum optics and many-body physics have largely evolved along separate trajectories. While many-body physics explores emergent collective phenomena, quantum optics has refined the measurement of correlations between individual photons. Here, we introduce photon correlation microscopy (PCM) - which bridges the two domains by leveraging correlations of emitted light to probe the correlations in quantum matter at mesoscopic scales. We demonstrate this approach using a one-dimensional (1D) ensemble of dipolar excitons confined at a lateral monolayer MoSe$_2$-WSe$_2$ heterojunction. We use gate-defined potentials to confine the 1D excitons to a mesoscopic lengthscale to enhance the visibility of matter correlations in the emitted photon field. Power-dependent spectroscopy reveals a transition from a compressible to an incompressible phase, signaled by the simultaneous saturation of the emission intensity and energy blueshift, which is supported by numerical simulations. Through this crossover, photon correlation measurements show a striking evolution from bunching at low densities to antibunching at high densities. This constitutes a many-body blockade of photon emission emerging directly from a number-stabilized state, driven by collective dipolar repulsion. Our results establish PCM as a powerful probe of many-body physics through the lens of quantum optics, extensible to a broad class of correlated electronic phases, while pointing toward a route to generating non-classical light through many-body correlations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_28623
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Photon correlation microscopy of quantum matter
Vandoolaeghe, Elie
Lasheras, Iñigo
Vaswani, Chirag
Saha, Sampriti
Ray, Purbasha
Taniguchi, Takashi
Watanabe, Kenji
Sahoo, Prasana
Defenu, Nicolò
Chervy, Thibault
Murthy, Puneet A.
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Quantum Gases
Light and matter share fundamental statistical properties, yet the experimental probes of quantum optics and many-body physics have largely evolved along separate trajectories. While many-body physics explores emergent collective phenomena, quantum optics has refined the measurement of correlations between individual photons. Here, we introduce photon correlation microscopy (PCM) - which bridges the two domains by leveraging correlations of emitted light to probe the correlations in quantum matter at mesoscopic scales. We demonstrate this approach using a one-dimensional (1D) ensemble of dipolar excitons confined at a lateral monolayer MoSe$_2$-WSe$_2$ heterojunction. We use gate-defined potentials to confine the 1D excitons to a mesoscopic lengthscale to enhance the visibility of matter correlations in the emitted photon field. Power-dependent spectroscopy reveals a transition from a compressible to an incompressible phase, signaled by the simultaneous saturation of the emission intensity and energy blueshift, which is supported by numerical simulations. Through this crossover, photon correlation measurements show a striking evolution from bunching at low densities to antibunching at high densities. This constitutes a many-body blockade of photon emission emerging directly from a number-stabilized state, driven by collective dipolar repulsion. Our results establish PCM as a powerful probe of many-body physics through the lens of quantum optics, extensible to a broad class of correlated electronic phases, while pointing toward a route to generating non-classical light through many-body correlations.
title Photon correlation microscopy of quantum matter
topic Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Quantum Gases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28623